Altcoins plunge over 80%, but who is making hundreds of millions by "licking blood on the knife edge" during this epic crash?

Original Title: "During the Crash, Who Dared to 'Lick Blood from the Blade' and Made Hundreds of Millions? Which Get-Rich-Quick Opportunities Are Right in Front of Us?"

Original Author: Azuma, Odaily

Following 312 and 519, 1011 is destined to be another date written into the history of cryptocurrency.

Last night, affected by Trump’s sudden tariff remarks, global financial markets plummeted, and the cryptocurrency market was also hit hard—BTC once fell to 101,500 USDT, ETH to 3,373.67 USDT, SOL to 144.82 USDT, and BNB to 860 USDT.

Even more dramatic were the smaller-cap altcoins, which, possibly due to cascading liquidations, saw short-term drops of over 80% or even 90%. I personally experienced 312 and 519, but I have never seen such exaggerated single-day declines across so many altcoins.

Odaily note: Screenshot of Binance's top losers in the early morning, and this wasn’t even the lowest point.

According to Coinglass data, as of around 7:40 this morning, the total amount of liquidations across the network in the past 24 hours reached $19.133 billions, with as many as 1,618,240 people liquidated. The largest single liquidation was a $203 million ETH long position on the Hyperliquid platform.

In such extreme market conditions, although the vast majority of users suffered heavy losses (for example, Machi was liquidated multiple times overnight), there were also those who "snatched chestnuts from the fire" and seized the opportunity to get rich in this extreme market.

Get-Rich-Quick Opportunity 1: Direct Shorting

The simplest way to get rich, of course, is to directly short the market—no need to elaborate further.

For example, according to Hypurrsan data, the whale address starting with 0x2ea18 made $72.33 million in the past 24 hours by shorting BTC and ETH. This whale has already withdrawn $60 million USDC back to Arbitrum, securing the profits.

Get-Rich-Quick Opportunity 2: Bottom Fishing

Compared to contract traders, the biggest opportunity for spot users is naturally bottom fishing—if you had limit orders at the lows last night or stayed up all night, you might have been able to buy:

XRP at $1.25;

DOGE at $0.095;

SUI at $0.55;

IP at $1;

XPL at $0.25;

ARB at $0.1;

AAVE at $79;

PENDLE at $1.65;

JUP at $0.05;

ENA at $0.13;

UNI at $2;

TRUMP at $1.5;

ATOM at $0.001 (yes, you read that right!);

IOTX at $0.00000 (yes, you still read that right! See the chart below ↓)……

Besides small-cap altcoins, mainstream coins like ETH and SOL, although their declines seemed less severe, also presented excellent bottom-fishing opportunities—due to liquidity constraints, some liquidity derivative tokens experienced huge price swings, with WBETH once dropping to $430 and BNSOL to $34.9—who could have imagined seeing ETH at $400 and SOL at $30 before going to bed last night…

After the market partially recovered, many KOLs began to openly share their profits on X. For example, Vida (@Vida_BWE) directly disclosed that he made about $8 million overnight.

Get-Rich-Quick Opportunity 3: Stablecoin Depegging

Aside from the still-uncertain altcoins, the short-term depegging of USDe was also a major bottom-fishing opportunity last night.

Possibly due to market liquidity issues (some users needed to swap USDe back to USDT to replenish margin), USDe experienced a depeg last night, dropping to as low as $0.6268 amid panic and cascading liquidations. Some users seized this opportunity to buy the dip and made a fortune after the peg was restored.

Afterwards, Ethena’s official account posted on X confirming that USDe was safe, and that the protocol even made extra money during the extreme market—"Due to market volatility and large-scale liquidations, USDe’s secondary market price fluctuated. We can confirm that USDe’s minting and redemption functions have always remained operational, with no downtime, and USDe remains over-collateralized. Due to liquidations, the contract trading price in the market has consistently been below the spot price. Since Ethena holds spot and shorts contracts, this unexpectedly generated additional revenue for USDe. As a result of the incident, USDe’s over-collateralization ratio will be even higher than yesterday."

No Need to Worry—Only a Few Profit, Missing Out Is Just Fate

For those who missed last night’s market (myself included), watching these opportunities slip away may cause some envy or anxiety, but the reality is that probably less than 1% of users got rich from this, while over 99% woke up to face losses in their accounts.

In one night, nearly $20 billions vanished in the contract market. It was a night of massive wealth transfer, and also a night when many users lost everything… In such extremely volatile times, all we can do is reduce risk and preserve our capital—after all, only those who stay at the table can play until the end.

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